We need an iBrowse replacement for 68k!!!

[Yasu]

Just a quick question: how about a bounty/kickstarter to open source Ibrowse? Since a lot of modern stuff is out of the classic Amigas range, wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate on making web pages look correct, making SSL work properly and such things?

[Yasu]

Ibrowse works fine on slower Amigas. How slow an Amiga will Netsurf be a joy to use?

[Yasu]

Will Netsurf work on a plain A1200 with 4 MB fast RAM?

[Yasu]

It's situations like that where I believe a Dillo port would be more suited. I'd suggest you try, but I think you'll run out of RAM very quickly.

It rather makes me think open sorceing Ibrowse would be a good idea. Netsurf might be better for beefier Amigas, but lets not forget about the ones with slower machines.

[Yasu]

(Not picking on you, Yasu)

I understand that not everyone has a big system, but come on, this is why we can't have nice things.

The "it's gotta work on an A500" mentality didn't help us in the 90's and it's not helping now.

At some point, you need to get some upgrades if you want to run software that wasn't made in the 90's, for 80's systems.

Which is why I use MorphOS

[Yasu]

So, Netsurf on faster machins and an open sourced Ibrowse for slower ones?

[Yasu]

There woun't be open source iBrowse I'm a afraid.

But any way, I do not understand what you would possible do with 4mb ram Amiga on internet?

FTP would be more suitable for that kind of machine.

Being able to see a homepage correctly would be enough. And use Paypal, Amazon and other SSL related stuff. I don't demand that you can do everything, just that homepages doesn't look like crap.

[Yasu]

I agree. I doubt the Ibrowse authors feel like going open-source just like that, though. If you can convince them, then do it.

If not, then there are a few light-weight alternatives available. Dillo would be the best bet, as I see it.

For the right sum I think he would. It's not like he is making money out of it now anyway (especially since he's not selling keys anymore).

But there is also this fanboyish argument: Ibrowse is a genuine Amiga product. Keeping it alive would be cool in itself. Not as useful as Netsurf of course, but we are talking about 20+ year old technology. Making Ibrowse good enough to buy stuff and view homepages more correctly would be enough IMO.

[Yasu]

That involves ripping out the entire layout engine and starting again with CSS integration.  If you read Andy Broad's comments on this wrt AWeb, it will involve replacing the engine with something like Webkit, in which case all you've got is another Webkit-based browser, which is not much different from OWB/Odyssey.  Obviously I don't know the internals of iBrowse, but I strongly suspect these comments apply there too - otherwise they'd have done it by now (especially as it is a commercial product so there is an incentive to update it to modern standards).  They *could* rewrite from scratch but that will take time and they will end up with something not too dissimilar to NetSurf.

Either way, open sourcing it isn't going to help anybody.  If back-porting something already existing on Amiga-like platforms isn't happening, then updating an old browser (much more work) isn't going to either.

I didn't think about that. I doubt it that "they would have done it by now" though since Ibrowse has not been for sale for a long time now. And all updates up till recently seems to have been mostly bug fixes and not about adding new stuff. But maybe you are right that Ibrowse is too far behind to be worth the trouble.

I guess I just hate to see a once excellent and important program disappear into obscurity.